Teaching Kids Real Virtue Doesn't Mean Safe Sex

June 02, 2006|By LAURENCE D. COHEN Laurence D. Cohen is a public policy consultant who served as special assistant to former Gov. John G. Rowland. His column appears every Friday. He can be reached at cohencolumn@aol.com.

Male alligators often wander up to female alligators, and grunt something about wanting to have sex, right now.

The girls will size up the fella, either deciding that he is the gator of their dreams, or that he would have a better chance getting a girl through a kinky personal ad in the Hartford Advocate.

Amazingly, this subtle bit of negotiation works just fine -- a miracle, considering that the brain of a male gator is the size of a cashew.

And then, of course, there are human teenagers, who, presumably, have brains larger than that of a gator, but have the sexual practices of rabbits in heat.

In recent years, the United States has unleashed armies of social workers and counselors and preachers attempting to suggest that if alligators can control their impulses, so, too, perhaps, can human teenagers.

The problem appears to be that while alligators have been sung to from the same hymnal, the human kids get conflicting advice.

Consider that in the same week Connecticut gubernatorial candidate John DeStefano Jr. was convening a task force of all the usual players (politicians, single moms, social workers and the like), to ponder the mysteries of teenage pregnancy, the governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, found a million bucks in federal money to sponsor ``abstinence'' programs in public middle schools.

DeStefano, the mayor of New Haven, has stacked the committee with players guaranteed to poo-poo ``abstinence'' -- which would be some surprise to a lot of female alligators.

So, assuming you were a confused teenage girl, you could travel down to New Haven and, presumably, get a dose of how empowered you are and how many flavors birth-control pills come in; or, you could scoot up to Massachusetts and get a good lecturing to about not being a slut.

The churches have added to this confusion of messages for kids -- especially the ``modern,'' mainstream, with-it versions of traditional denominations, which are disinclined to express old-fashioned disapproval of sleeping around.

Some academic research suggests that the effectiveness of the ``abstinence'' programs and ``vows'' and such stuff is exaggerated, but at the least there are some adults willing to say, ``don't have sex, you frisky pups,'' without worrying about whether they appear dorky or old-fashioned.

A new report from the Guttmacher Institute disclosed that contraception has declined among American women, especially among poor women, which predictably enough is being blamed not on an increase in irresponsible behavior, but on not enough money being available for family planning clinics. We don't care about promiscuity, girls. Just take a pill or make your boyfriend wear a condom.

Former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett tells a little joke about the ambiguity of these aggressive ``safe-sex'' messages to kids. A young guy learns his lessons well, is very impressed and, as the end of the school year approaches, asks the school nurse for four crates of condoms to get him through the summer.

At the end of the day, boys who have not been tamed by society will be on the prowl and, for better or for worse, it will be up to the girls to lock the doors and sleep alone.

The boys? Sure, teach them the joys of child support and the criminal penalties for statutory rape. And offer them at least the old-fashioned option that an alternative to ``safe'' sex is no sex at all, until they're ready to see that girl in a wedding gown, sipping champagne.

The crippling obstacle to teaching kids a coherent set of rules about social behavior is that our social service network is funded to lavish attention on pregnant girls and single moms -- which offers up little incentive to explain the advantages of not having sex with the creatures who come sniffing around.

Oddly enough, even our most sophisticated and snobbish young girls have taken society's message to heart. In many suburban schools, oral sex is routinely carried out, on the theory that it is ``safe,'' and thus, by modern standards, bordering on virtuous.

Mayor DeStefano's community services administrator has promised that the task force won't focus on abstinence, because that ``doesn't work.'' There's a message about sex that the teens will hear loud and clear.